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04/07/2022

New generation of cancer-preventing vaccines could wipe out tumors before they form

EXTRACT FROM Article Originally published By Jocelyn Kaiser in Science.org

Shots enter early clinical trials for healthy people at high risk for disease

Calvri is testing a multicancer prevention vaccine—not yet in people, but in dogs. In a 5-year trial, a team is giving 400 middle-age dogs a vaccine that contains 31 antigens from eight common dog cancers. (Another 400 dogs are getting a placebo vaccine.) It relies on RNA neoantigens, little-studied molecules that result from RNA processing errors rather than mutations in DNA. They are far more abundant than DNA neoantigens in dogs and people, and are “highly immunogenic,” says developer and biochemist Stephen Johnston of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, Tempe. If they prove effective, they might make it easier to reach the White House’s goal of developing a pancancer human vaccine, he says.

Read this article in full on the Science.org website here.